‘Drums,’ she said. ‘Fen and Xambun’s beats. They are wishing them safety at night.’
I told her about the talk in the men’s house and their hope that Xambun’s spirit would return to him. We could hear people gathering near the drums. A few women passed below the house, their children lagging behind, one with a knitted doll Nell must have given her. Lightning was still flashing, silently, behind the northern hills where the moon would soon rise. I felt the world had finally carved out a little place for me.
We talked of our Grid.
‘Personality depends on context, just like culture,’ she said. ‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?’
I wasn’t looking at much of anything. I was just trying not to look at her. No sign of the moon, and the lake wasn’t visible save in the few seconds that the lightning flashed. But the air was shifting. I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished.
‘Let’s go down to the sand and make the rain come,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Let’s do a dance, like the Zuni.’
And then she was down the ladder, racing to the path. I followed. Of course I followed.
Neither of us knew an actual rain dance, but we improvised. She claimed ami was the Zuni word for rain. It was cheating because the rain was coming, everything was shifting so fast, the wind had worked the tall palms into a froth above us and scudded hard against the water and the sky was low and black. But we stomped on the sand and called out Ami! Ami! and every other word we knew for rain and wet and water, and everything suddenly got blacker and cooler and the wind fierce and the memory of rain, real rain, came on quickly, only a few moments before the rain itself. We held our faces up and spread out our arms. Big drops smacked all over us and drove the insects on our skin to the ground.
The rain hit the lake water loudly and it took my ears several minutes to get used to the roar. You don’t realize in the dry season how much is held in, but now all the sounds and smells came back, stirred up by the wind and humidity, flowers and roots and leaves exhaling their full flavor. Even the lake itself released a pungent peat odor as the rain dug into it. Nell seemed smaller and younger and I could see her easily at thirteen, at nine, a little girl on a Pennsylvania farm, and all I could do was keep looking. I hardly knew I wasn’t speaking. ‘I think we should go in,’ she said.
I thought she meant go back to the house, but she turned from me and unbuttoned her dress and dropped it in the sand. She walked to the water in a brassiere and short American knickers, loose at the thigh. ‘I can’t swim, so you better join me.’
I quickly pulled off my shirt and trousers. The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I’d had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.
She really couldn’t swim. How had I not noticed this before? I paddled around but she remained upright, bouncing on her toes. Of course I wanted to offer to teach her, to hold her as my mother had held me in the River Cam, to feel the weight of her in my arms, the edge of her brassiere against my fingers, knickers thin and wet as they broke the surface. I could feel it far too well without actually doing it, and I found I had to keep swimming away from her to try and subdue the effects, then swimming back to hear what she was saying through the smashing rain.
The rain was still lashing as we ran back up to the house. We put on dry clothes, each in the dark of our respective mosquito rooms. I fished out some old-looking Australian biscuits from the hoard and she asked if I was never not hungry. I said I was twice her size which led to an argument about how many inches were between us which led to measuring each other against a post, marking the spot with a penknife then calculating the difference. I held the measuring tape out flat, my fingers damp from the swim and dusty from all the biscuits. Seventeen inches.
‘It seems like more when it’s horizontal like that. Up and down it doesn’t seem so dramatic, does it?’